


Solidaridad

by Alterz



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, I'll be honest this was supposed to be slash but it just never quite got there, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-11-04 04:38:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10983540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alterz/pseuds/Alterz
Summary: "Greetings from a fan in Mexico."Their friendship starts with emails. Their styles may be like night and day, but Lúcio and Sombra are both revolutionaries in their own ways, and those similarities can form a strong bond despite their distance and differences. That doesn't make the differences go away.It's simple at first, and then it's complicated.





	1. Chapter 1

Lúcio gets the first email early on in his career. It's not particularly notable at the time: enough of his shows have been recorded by fans and posted online for him to have some international fans, and he can still have contact info publicly available because Vishkar is barely a note in the news. It's a pretty standard fan letter, but Lúcio is still blown away by every letter he gets. Her Portuguese is passable enough. He sends back a warm thank you, making sure to stick to simple language so whatever translator she's using won't butcher it.

~~~

The next email is much later, when the extent of the Vishkar nightmare is just starting to become apparent in the favela. Lúcio's personal site is less open, no longer has shots of his face, though that won't stop anyone who digs from finding the old ones. He responded to her last email, though, so of course she still has the address.

It comes after the first time that he really says what he thinks before a show. "You know why tonight's special?" he'd said. "Because Vishkar doesn't want you to be here. They want you working, or they want you sleeping so you'll do better work. No fun allowed. But where's Vishkar's dogs now? We're all here tonight, and they're not. And you better believe we're going to party. They don't like it? They can step right off."

The government rips the video off of youtube within hours, but by then it's been copied and shared.

"Greetings from a fan in Mexico," the email starts. "I wrote a long time ago, because I liked your music. I didn't know then that we have a lot in common. We don't hear much here about what's happening in the favelas, but I think I can guess. What you said before your show was a little right ¿you know what I mean? ¿Do they tell you in Brazil about what's happening in Mexico?

"Solidaridad, my friend."

It's at once heartening and disheartening, knowing that there are people outside his home who are sharing the same struggles and sending him, and his family by extension, their support. He's not surprised that a quick dig online doesn't get him much of anything similar in Mexico.

Lúcio responds: "Solidarity, my friend. Our news says nothing about Mexico having these problems. It doesn't say anything about Brazil having these problems, either. But despite the silence of the people in charge, people are still finding out and talking about it. They can press mute on the unrest, but they can't make it go away."

~~~

His next concert ends in a raid, and Lúcio barely makes it away. He debates whether to go home or not, and ultimately decides that if Vishkar hunts him down he's going to face them on his own turf instead of hiding like an animal.

When Lúcio gets home, there's a new message waiting for him.

"How very inspirational. I can tell you're trying to speak more simply, and it still comes through. I think you may have a skill ;)

"The people who run the world are never going to care for people like us unless it's to crush us. I have some personal experience with that ¿you understand? But I'm still here, and I'm not going anywhere.

"You can call me Shadow."

Today won't be the day that Lúcio's arrested, but he doesn't know that. It's just a nice moment of much needed emotional support. He chuckles at the name, not so much because it's funny as that he needs anything to break the tension thrumming up and down his spine. Maybe he can channel this specific sort of adrenaline into the baseline of his next track, if he's not rotting in a Vishkar holding cell somewhere no one will ever find him.

The name is a little dramatic and on the nose, but that's charming.

"I understand pretty well right now. I'm waiting to see if today's the day they come for me. I don't want to go anywhere either."

He pauses here, thinking, and then figures to hell with it and writes the thoughts down to share with at least one other person.

"I think I'd rather keep my name. If I'm still here tomorrow, then I want to keep being here. It's not enough that I still live. _Lúcio_ needs to live. I'm not judging your situation. I don't know what was happening that made you become Shadow. But I'm not going to hide."

Lúcio doesn't know what else he can say. He sends the email.

A response comes almost immediately this time: "I saw. The video was taken off the air very fast, but I'm good at finding things.

"Our situations are a little different. I couldn't do what you're doing. It wasn't a choice. But I'm glad that Lúcio still exists. I like his music ;)"

~~~

Lúcio is true to his word: he doesn't disappear. His next track is inspired by that feeling when he'd been sitting in his tiny room, waiting for the company enforcers to kick the door down, deciding that the fear wasn't going to silence him. If he has a gift, it's not his words like Shadow said: it's his music. He pours the strength of that conviction into his music, samples some sirens and some shouts to set the scene, and brings in a solid beat that starts too quiet to hear under the subsonic hum but crescendos into the racing of his heart by the end.

When he plays it at his next show, the energy in the room is palpable.

Shadow tells him it's his best song yet.

~~~

He doesn't add lyrics to his tracks very often, priding himself on his ability to put the message in the melody, but sometimes he needs to convey something a little more complicated. Lúcio samples his own voice when need be, but he likes collecting the voices of people around the favela, weaving the message out of the voices of the people, each clipped together in pieces too short for vocal recognition to use.

Cleaned versions of his songs go up online, too, for free. He doesn't want people limited by money or the grainy quality of a cell phone video.

Shadow sends him a link to an American news station running a human interest piece about this Brazilian artist that the youth are listening to. Lúcio's picked up some pretty functional English just from international media, but he turns on captioning to make sure he gets all of it. He frowns at the video the whole way through. He doesn't know what to do with the idea that he has fans who can't understand a word he's saying. They don't know what he's talking about. But they mention that they get emotional, that they feel like it's a fight song. One guy says it "makes me want to go out and tell the big guys to go fuck themselves." Maybe that guy knows a little Portuguese.

There's enough of them who clearly don't get it at all, referring to his music as catchy dance songs, to keep him grounded. But there's also enough of them who _get it_ , not wholly, not completely, but get at least some little part of his message through the music that he gets a little teary-eyed.

When he emails Shadow back, he tells her his next step: "We need to make some more noise."

~~~

He does, eventually, get arrested. Technically. A raid breaks up his concert again, declaring it an unauthorized rally, against curfew, and an undeniable act of sedition.

There are a lot more guests, supposed rebels, than enforcers. Lúcio holds his head high as they're walking him to the car, hands cuffed, helmet lost, and face bruised. It's going to suck to be a martyr, but he made his peace with it a long time ago and there's no way he can overpower these guys. May as well face his unknown future with furious dignity.

The crowd tips the car over before the enforcers get him within five meters of it. Now that it's less like 1-on-12 and more like 100-on-12, the Vishkar suits start to get worried and Lúcio starts to looks for a chance. Their grips loosen as they try to decide whether to go for their weapons or not, and Lúcio executes an Aú sem Mão to make his mother proud and makes a break into the crowd.

~~~

According to the news, thirty people are severely injured in the ensuing riot. Vishkar makes a public statement explaining the dangers of being involved in illegal gatherings, the drugs and drink passed around, how people get overstimulated and act out to their own detriment. Whispers in the favela say that all the injuries came from the Vishkar guys blasting their way through the crowd. They say that once Lúcio was out of their grip, the rest of the so-called-rioters were just trying to get out of the area, shouting at the enforcers to leave because they're not wanted here.

This is unacceptable. Lúcio learns the two versions of the story while sitting in the back of his cousin's mechanic shop as they try to remove the hard-light cuffs without taking a hand in the process. It's hard enough to get decent prosthetics in the development; trying to get one that's not a Vishkar product will be functionally impossible, and the idea of getting one from Vishkar themselves is laughable.

Vishkar's minions have top-of-the-line technology. Lúcio's friends and family, his people, make that technology all day long but own nothing that can even compare. Lúcio looks at the circuit boards in the disassembled cuffs and starts to think.

~~~

Stealing Vishkar's technology is legitimately easier than any other option, but it's also poetic.

~~~

He keeps his head down after the break-in. Vishkar's goons are all over the place, trying to find him without letting on about the reason for their increased interest. His apartment is lost to him, but the rebellion is gaining traction and he's not the only leader anymore. There's six of them getting quietly smuggled between safe-houses, keeping in contact through jail-broken communicators as they organize their people.

Lúcio lets the others deal with the logistics for awhile. Cracking Vishkar's tech takes all of his effort.

Back when he first realized that the message was starting to be heard, Lúcio and a few of his friends set up a secondary contact point for his fans to reach him, shielded with every trick they could come up with between the four of them. It would've been safer to have no inbox at all, but Lúcio had insisted that he had to be able to answer questions from fans who wanted to know more. Now, the international news mentions the riot, and he's suddenly got a lot of questions. He feels bad that most of them are answered with the same copied paragraph, but he's too busy to do more.

Shadow, unprompted, emails him to let him know that she tried to crack into his server and "it actually gave me some trouble" so Vishkar probably won't get into it any time soon as long as they keep changing things up. It's not the first time that Lúcio's wondered what Shadow did to get herself in so much trouble that she erased her identity, but it's the first time he's felt like he might have a hint.

He still keeps the incriminating stuff out of his emails.

~~~

The day he declares the sonic amplifier complete, the other rebellion leaders cheer. The foreign media calls them his "lieutenants," but he feels uncomfortable with that term no matter how willing they are to follow his lead.

This is going to change the game entirely. Vishkar won't be able to hurt the people of the favela anymore.

~~~

Shadow's next communication comes three days after Vishkar officially announces that they're going to abandon the Brazilian developments. The partying has finally begun to die down, but for awhile there was dancing in the streets and Lúcio could hear his own music filtering up from all directions when he returned to his long-abandoned hovel. It's definitely been squatted in and half his things were stolen, thanks to the goons breaking the lock when they came for him. He's glad the pay-what-you-want system on his music has been bringing in money from overseas. It'll replace what's missing. He'll probably even be able to move somewhere a little nicer to work in.

"Very nicely done, my friend. I heard some gringo refer to you as a terrorist, so clearly you're doing something right.

"But I have a question for you, Lúcio. ¿Did you really steal and repurpose Vishkar tech? ¿And you didn't tell me? I thought we were friends :( "

He hopes the frowny face means she's not too serious.

"I know you said my mail was safe, but I still don't think I'm going to incriminate myself in text ;)" he sends back.

She sends him an application. It's no commercial thing. He thinks that she may have programmed her own communication app. It has a little skull icon.

The call goes through, and the woman who appears on his screen is striking. She looks about his age, maybe a little older, with unnatural purple eyes and sharp features. He's not sure what he imagined Shadow would look like, but now that he sees her it seems fitting. She's very pink for a shadow.

"Hello, my friend," she greets. She has a nice smile and a lovely voice. "You're looking good for a rebel leader." It's funny how he can tell which words are the same in both Spanish and Portuguese; Shadow speaks more slowly during some parts of her sentences while others flow smoothly off her tongue.

"It's a pleasure to meet one of my oldest fans," Lúcio replies, smiling back.

"Qué encantador," Shadow says. _Charming_. "Really, though, did you steal Vishkar's technology? I'm dying to know." She leans towards the screen like they're sharing a secret over a table instead of over 7,000 kilometers.

Lúcio picks up the screen and turns it to show her the sonic amplifier. "You tell me," he says. When he turns the screen around, Shadow's smile looks impressed.

~~~

They start chatting more often. As long as they keep the time difference in mind, it works. There's whole stretches of time where Shadow is out of contact; Lúcio's in the public eye on the world stage and can't be easily made to disappear anymore, but Shadow still has to go to ground regularly. The communication app is encrypted six ways from Sunday and Lúcio's head spins when she shares just a little bit of it with him.

They make the best of it when she's available, though. Sometimes that means watching video game streams together. Sometimes that means comparing notes on how to run an armed insurrection.

Lúcio looks up Guillermo Portero after she tells him about the man, and his whole public image is almost too good to be true. Shadow is more than willing to tell him about the seedy underbelly.

"LumériCo is more subtle than Vishkar was," Shadow tells him. "There are no curfews or obvious tyranny like that. But you look around and there are more and more poor people every day. You follow the money and you find that all of it keeps going up to Portero and his closest friends, and none of it comes back down. The citizens suffer, and there is nothing to take a video of. I'm trying to get something concrete."

Lúcio thinks of what she's told him she can do. "There's nothing in his emails?" he asks.

"I haven't been able to get into them yet," she says, making a face like she's personally offended by the server's failure to give up its secrets. "The work I do to pay the bills keeps dragging me away from this. If I could work on it twenty-four seven maybe it wouldn't take so long, but of course I can't. And you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get good help over here." Shadow rolls her eyes dramatically. Lúcio laughs, but he can understand her frustration.

~~~

Shadow's Portuguese starts getting much smoother. When Lúcio suggests that maybe he should start trying to get better at Spanish in return, she grins and doesn't speak Portuguese again for the next three months.

~~~

Despite the safety of the spotlight, Lúcio is still encouraged to get out of Brazil for awhile. That idea quickly forms into the seeds of the Synaesthesia world tour. He's been working prolifically on his music since the rebellion ended, and he's gotten more than a few inquiries, casually from fans and more professionally from producers, about whether he'll do live shows outside of Brazil.

"I thought it bothered you that they don't understand," Shadow says.

"It did, yeah," Lúcio answers, "but I realized that they don't have to understand the music. The music just has to bring them together where they can hear the message. I've gotten so many messages from around the world saying that my interviews spoke to them because they were also poor and working themselves to death. There's systems all over the place that are hurting people and making their lives worse. Maybe I can do something about it, like I did in Rio."

"You want to take the revolution worldwide?" asks Shadow.

"Something like that," says Lúcio.

"The powers that be aren't going to like that one bit," she says. It sounds like the very idea is cheering her up.

"They don't have to," Lúcio declares.

"I'll buy you some time, then. They won't be looking at you when the revolution hits Dorado," Shadow tells him proudly.

"You got something?" Lúcio asks with some surprise.

"I got some help," she says. "I'm making progress."

"Look at us," says Lúcio, waving a hand between himself and her face on the screen. "We're gonna do great."

~~~

They start practicing English too. Apparently Shadow already has to speak English with her coworkers, but Lúcio wants to make sure he's got it down before the tour. Not many people speak Portuguese. More people speak Spanish. English is _everywhere_.

Shadow laughs herself sick when she first hears Lúcio talk. "You sound like an American hip-hop artist! How did that happen?"

"How do you think?" he asks in return. "I learned from listening to a lot of American hip-hop artists."

~~~

Lúcio is packing and double checking all of his gear for the first of several moves between other people's offices as the final preparations for the tour begin. Shadow is on the screen hanging out and asking questions about the tech. He's told her a lot about it already, since she's one of the few people who can really appreciate the effort that went into jail-breaking it, but so much of it is new that they've got plenty to talk about.

Shadow has to cut him off when an alert pings at her end. He waits patiently, watching her reading through something on her screen. The excitement blooming over her face is a sight to behold.

"Good news?" Lúcio asks when she finally looks back up.

"The best news," Shadow answers. "My help finally came through."

It takes Lúcio a moment to process that, and then he smiles. "Did they come through a little, or a lot?"

Shadow's smile isn't very nice at all, spreading sharp across her face. The cat that got the canary. "She who has the information, has the power," Shadow says in Spanish, "and I have the power to bring LumériCo to its knees."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Please drop a kudos or a comment if you enjoyed it.


	2. Chapter 2

Overwatch and Lúcio first meet by accident. There's an Omnic Rights rally that happens to coincide with downtime during the Synaesthesia tour and Lúcio decides to check it out. Wearing skates doesn't stand out too much, and he's got his amplifier in a bag just in case things go bad.

Tracer, or Lena, as he'll soon know her, is there for almost the exact same reasons: she supports the rally, and Overwatch wants someone present if anyone tries to disrupt the peaceful protest. He meets her for the first time when he hears, "Oh my god, you're Lúcio!", turns around with a smile for a fan, and recognizes the vigilante.

Nothing goes monumentally wrong at the rally, which Lúcio considers lucky. Tensions with the police get high, and there are arrests. It's not pretty. Lúcio's had enough experience with these things that he knows it could've been much uglier.

He and Lena end up talking for awhile, going their separate ways when they're no longer needed. Lúcio asks her, quietly, whether the rumors that Overwatch has reformed are true. She quietly tells him that, if Overwatch _were_ reforming, he'd be on the short list for people they might want to recruit. "The world needs more people like you," Lena says.

~~~

He's in the air somewhere over North Africa when they officially contact him. Official may not be the right word. The channel is encrypted. He wonders if the UN really thinks that making organizing illegal will stop people from doing it.

"Hello?" a deep voice greets him when Lúcio answers the call. The audio has the slightly distant sound of speakerphone. "Is this, uh, Mr. dos Santos?"

"Call me Lúcio," he answers. Lúcio's gotten so used to that being the name his fans call him, hearing the formal version is almost strange. And if this is the call he thinks it is, he may as well get the formalities out of the way now.

"Yes, of course," the man agrees readily. "My name is Winston. Lena tells me she's already spoken with you?"

"Nice to be chattin' with you again, luv!" Lena makes herself known on the call.

"Hey Lena," Lúcio greets, smiling though they can't see him. He's looking up 'Winston + Overwatch' on his tablet. It's a little strange to realize that he's talking to a gorilla right now. "We talked a bit, yeah."

"Would this be a good time to speak to you a little more?" Winston asks. Lúcio's pretty sure that actually means _Can you speak freely right now?_

He pushes the web browser to the side and pulls up his schedule instead. "I've got thirty minutes before this plane lands," he says. "Let's do this."

~~~

He does some low-key Overwatch work, putting himself in places where help might be needed or where information could be gathered when the tour brings him near it. They don't want to risk revealing his association yet, but his movements conveniently bring him near places Overwatch is interested in a few times. The whole point of the Synaesthesia tour was to help people. As far as Lúcio's concerned, this is just an extension of that.

He's wary, but optimistic. The new Overwatch seems to be trying to do something different than their predecessor: more individual operatives and work with immediately apparent positive effects. No large-scale military operations. No mystery branch violating civil rights in the background. It's about as transparent as a globally illegal organization can be.

It's all very quiet so far. Other than playing tourist a little more than originally planned, Lúcio isn't doing anything different. Yet.

~~~

Lúcio has no idea how Shadow finds out. There's being good at finding information and then there's _this_. Not that he even realizes what's happened at first.

"Hello, my friend," Shadow greets him. She's speaking in Portuguese like she did when they first started, but it won't last; at this point, they can and do switch between languages, depending on what conveys nuance better and whether they feel like trying to catch the other off guard. "Still enjoying your tour? Meeting new and interesting people?"

"Sure am," Lúcio says, thinking of his latest phone call back to Gibraltar. "And I've been getting even more requests for an encore tour. People who watch the stream still want the chance to see the show live."

"Congratulations. I'm sure you'll be travelling to all sorts of new places soon enough." Shadow smiles wide, but there's an edge to it that Lúcio can't quite place. Something's wrong at her end. Before he can ask about it, she continues, "I need to talk to you about that, actually."

Lúcio turns to the screen a little more, so she knows she has his full attention. "Somewhere you need me to be?" he asks.

"No, no, nothing like that," Shadow laughs him off. She looks into the distance off-screen, taps a long pink nail against her cheek thoughtfully. "I've told you before that I'm playing a long game, right?"

She has. Lúcio nods. She nods back, like she's confirming it in her head.

"This is the thing about you and I: we agree on a lot of things," Shadow says. Her nails rap against the surface of her table. "We are both very aware of the ways that the world is rigged. The systems in place to keep those on top and those on the bottom exactly where they are. It's what drew me to you in the first place."

"I remember."

Shadow purses her lips in an unhappy moue. "The thing is," she looks sidelong at him, "you believe the system can be changed. You believe it can be rearranged or torn down. And I… don't." Before he can say anything, she rapidly continues. "Don't get me wrong! I love that you believe that! Your passion for people and your commitment to changing things for them are inspiring. I want you to be right! I just don't think that you are."

She looks upset. Lúcio doesn't know what to say, stomach in knots. He has the overwhelming feeling that something bigger than he realizes is happening. It's the feeling before a front hits, when the air is so heavy with water that you know the storm could break at any time.

"What's bringing this on, Shadow?" he asks.

Shadow's smile is almost more like a grimace. She switches to English suddenly. "You and I are about to have a problem, amigo."

Lúcio frowns outright, switching with her. "What sort of problem, Sombra?"

"The kind I've been trying to avoid for awhile now," she confesses. "And I promise, because we _are_ friends, that I will do my best to put it off a little longer. But it's only delaying the inevitable."

"Sombra," Lúcio says slowly, a worrying intuition striking in his mind, "what's your day job?"

Usually Lúcio likes Shadow's smile. This time, it carries a lot of complicated emotions behind it and looks vicious in a way that's never been directed at him before.

"Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to, amigo," she says.

He's starting to get a little angry now. "Why are you giving me this warning?"

Shadow sighs and leans back in her seat. "Because I want you to know, when this whole thing shakes out, that it wasn't a lie." She moves her fingers restlessly, holding her hand like she has claws. "This friendship we've had has been real. It'd be nice if we could keep having it."

She turns her hand outward and does a complicated little motion. Her pink nails glow and tap against equally pink hard-light icons that appear. It's some impressive gear. Lúcio wasn't aware anyone had that sort of technology, other than Vishkar and himself.

An alert pops up in the corner of his screen.

"Consider this a token of my goodwill," Shadow says. "Lo siento, Lúcio. I don't want us to be enemies. Don't take it personally when you see me."

~~~

It is a hint, a small one. A location on a blueprint for the place Lúcio was supposed to infiltrate in two weeks. _Avoid this spot_. No explanation about why, and certainly no explanation for how Shadow knew where he was supposed to be and when.

Shadow asked him not to take it personally, but Lúcio still feels betrayed, even if he doesn't know exactly how.

He doesn't hear from Shadow again.

~~~

Lúcio isn't what most people would look for when they look for someone who does infiltrations. His most famous position in the Rio revolution was at or near the front lines, blasting music to keep his side moralized and energized while Vishkar's people slowly backed down. The truth of the matter, though, is that if he were no good at it he would've been caught and incarcerated much earlier. Lúcio was only seen in the rebellion when he turned the spotlight on himself.

That he's good at it doesn't mean he can't get into trouble, though. It's a joint operation with Lena, trying to brute force their way to information on a location Overwatch've been unable to get anything on otherwise. Whatever alarm system got triggered is apparently hidden well enough that neither of them know how it got set off.

Lúcio's evading pretty well, and he think's he's managed to get himself out of the way. He just has to make it down one more hallway, around a corner, and he'll be clear to exit while Lena's getting out at the other end of the complex.

He turns the corner just in time to see a small device-- it looks weirdly like Lena's chest-piece-- activate, and draws up his amplifier to defend himself. A silhouette appears, then resolves itself into Shadow. She has a machine pistol.

Lúcio hesitates, and he knows afterwards exactly how lethal that could have been for him. His only salvation is that Shadow doesn't fire either. She gives him a shrug and a face that say _What can you do?_ , then puts a perfectly manicured finger to her lips and waves him towards the door with her pistol.

He doesn't have to think twice. She's letting him go, and the guards he'd evaded aren't far enough behind for him and Shadow to have a chat before they catch up. He goes.

Behind him, he hears Shadow speaking English into a communicator. "No, sorry. I got here too late. I'm in pursu-" Her words are cut off by the door closing with a click.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for reading! If you've enjoyed the fic so far, please drop a kudos or a comment. I appreciate every single one~


	3. Chapter 3

When she first creates Sombra, she erases the girl so completely that she doesn't even think of herself with her old name. Sombra feels some sympathy for the girl she used to be, who could have been great and didn't deserve to die forgotten, but the girl was doomed either way while Sombra, alone, can live.

Sombra faces a unique opportunity to create herself from whole cloth. It's heady. She sheds everything about her old self when she disappears, and picks what she wants to bring back or add as she puts herself back together. Bright colors. A stylish look that the girl in the gutters could never quite get. She decides to play up being playful. It's much safer to be a gadfly when you know you can up and vanish whenever you want, and much more fun as well.

She takes a special joy in wearing bright pinks and purples. Being able to go from unmissable to invisible never grows old.

~~~

Sombra is still creating herself when she happens to come across a video of Lúcio DJing in what looks like a crowded diner. He's upbeat and his audience is happily raucous despite the dingy conditions. The video's quality is terrible.

She's been on a video trawl for over an hour, burning time until she can move again. The related video links have taken her across most of Central and South America at random, and she's been entertaining herself with the differences in music coming out of different countries.

Lúcio is doing something different than the others. He doesn't just DJ, he mixes across different genres and cuts lines together to make new lyrics. It's more creative than most of the amateurs she's been watching, and despite the microphone static and the noisy crowd it manages to sound good.

His hair is in short locs, his arms are toned, and his smile is nice. He's wearing a frog shirt. It's… playful, a little. It's charming. She likes his image.

Sombra has nothing else to do right now. If there's any other videos, there's no one better to find them than her.

~~~

Sombra tries out being a person who sends fan letters. She emails a few different people, some whose work she liked before and some she's found now, through an account she can burn afterwards. Of the ones who respond, most seem like rote thank-yous. Lúcio's is personalized.

She decides she's not a person who sends fan letters, but the one response was nice.

~~~

Sombra doesn't know what Talon are aiming to do when she first joins. She knows the cause they sell her, but she's not stupid enough to trust it. Her digging has indicated that they're a connection to the web she's trying to uncover, though, so she joins and plays dumb and bugs _everything_.

Talon are idiots. They hired her for her infiltration abilities and do nothing to defend themselves from her. She can usually walk right in, cloaked or not, and sift through whatever she wants. That said, they're smart enough to disconnect cells and hide their command structure, so Sombra stays, watching from the shadows for the leaders to make their presence known.

~~~

When she first meets Gabriel Reyes, hero of the Omnic Crisis, Sombra has to try not to laugh. She doesn't know who he is at the time, only that he's a mercenary for Talon like she is and his image is beyond over the top.

She loves it, and she can't take him even a little bit seriously. It becomes her mission to knock him down a few pegs.

WIdowmaker, on the other hand, is a different sort entirely. Her femme fatale deal is appropriately attractive. Trying to tease her doesn't get much in the way of a reaction. It's either chilly dismissal or vague irritation. The woman is unflappable on a championship level. Sombra can respect that.

She can goad, question, or flirt, and Widowmaker is always the same, except for when she isn't. Every once in a long while, Widowmaker looks sad, or laughs, or flirts back. Sombra's life is complicated enough without sleeping with a Talon loyalist, but it's fun to indulge in the possibility sometimes. The rare prizes are worth continuing the game.

~~~

When Lúcio starts wearing the frog mask during shows, Sombra laughs at the upgrade from the shirt he was wearing that first time. A few months later, Lúcio lambastes the Vishkar corporation at the beginning of his set, and the mask becomes much less amusing. Sombra checks back through his website and notes that pictures of him are gone, as well as some of the older videos from back when someone started actually recording for him. The pre-frog-head videos.

She watches the video again, and pulls up a translator to make sure she gets the details. She'd caught the gist before, but most of it was lost to her. Except for the anger, the rebellion in his voice. That had come across loud and clear.

Cursory research turns up little-to-nothing beyond Vishkar's press conferences when they first moved into Rio de Janeiro. It all looks very innocuous. The video is no longer available online. Copies are already being hosted on two different file sharing sites. A third gets uploaded as she's saving one of them.

Sombra is not a person who writes fan letters, but she recognizes the sort of danger that Lúcio is suddenly in. It's uncomfortably familiar. There's no immediately obvious benefit to involving herself in his business, but Sombra is sure she can figure something out. And she does like the guy. She has a good feeling about him.

Lúcio's response is almost embarrassingly earnest, and Sombra is moved despite her better, more cynical instincts. It reminds her of running with Los Muertos. Sombra tries being someone encouraging, just for the novelty of it, but doesn't manage to do it without adding a teasing edge.

Still, it's easier to be honest with a man so far away. They'll never meet. When she warns him of the danger, she does so wondering whether this burgeoning revolutionary is going to be coming into the shadows with her or fleeing with his tail between his legs. He chooses a third option, and she's not sure what to make of it yet.

~~~

Talon tells her they want chaos. Chaos she can do. Inspired, she decides to start in Mexico, and goes back to Los Muertos.

It scratches an itch to kill two birds with this stone. Los Muertos had a mission statement, no matter how little some of their fringe members cared about it, and Sombra believed in it. She wouldn't have stopped focusing on the people running Mexico if they hadn't turned out to be small potatoes compared to the people running the world.

Admittedly, she might not have come back to this so quickly if Talon hadn't required it. She might not have come back to the revolution at all. But the ends justify the means: who cares if she gives Los Muertos a nudge on Talon's behalf, if it still helps her people topple LumériCo's corruption? Sombra knows some people would claim she's manipulating the revolution for her own gains, and they wouldn't be wrong, necessarily, but her conscience is clear. She can do the right thing by helping them and still profit on the side. It's just practical. No harm done.

~~~

Sombra fully expects that she's going to push Reaper too far and have to translocate out of the way of a faceful of buckshot, but time goes on and it never happens. He talks a good game, can even be reasonably menacing when he's dissolving into billowing smoke, but he's surprisingly lenient when it comes to her needling.

She calls him by name, and he chastises her for not focusing on the mission.

When Sombra finally realizes the truth, she can't believe she didn't notice earlier. The Reaper is as real as Sombra. Gabe has remade himself, and the character he's made himself into is a caricature of a bad guy, fun to play, and comical except for the fact that he's deathly competent behind the maniacal laughter.

It's with some delight that she realizes he's probably not taking himself much more seriously than she is. Widowmaker asks him once why he wasn't on an op of hers, and he deadpan tells her that he was working the graveyard shift that day. Widow doesn't so much as blink.

Sombra keeps playing with them, giving them things to roll their eyes at, and thinks their grumbling is more good-natured than it used to be. It's going to suck when she has to betray them.

~~~

She watches Rio explode from a distance, with Lúcio at the head, and thinks deposing Portero won't be so hard after all. She doesn't know if it will matter in the long term: historically, most revolutions seem to end with a new king as bad as the old one. She doubts Lúcio's favela will be in much better condition after Vishkar leaves, just like she knows that taking out LumériCo necessarily means crippling Mexico's infrastructure for the next year. Take out one piece of trash, and there's still more all around. The problem is so much bigger.

That said, it's nice for once to see at least a little of the problem solved. The carioca were being enslaved. Now, they're not. Lúcio is ecstatic, glowing with pride over their victory. He shows her the technology he used during the revolt, and Sombra knows she was right when she chose to reach out to him. She doesn't want to be on the wrong side of a guy whose tech skills could rival her own.

~~~

Poor Gabe. He puts a lot of effort into planning their assaults. Sombra can't speak for his missions without her, but the ones with her would have just a few more successes if he wasn't telling his attack strategy straight to the person planning to undermine it. She feels bad about it, but not enough to stop.

~~~

When she gets frustrated with how hard cracking LumériCo is, Sombra reminds herself that it's good practice. The better she gets at this, the better she'll be at infiltrating other systems in the future. Her goals are too grand to let herself be stymied by a difficult puzzle.

Still… she's already good enough with her rhetoric to swing Los Muertos back on track. Maybe she can get some help. Not from any of Talon's jokers, of course.

Then again, as she watches the civilians she's auditioning get distracted by a string of crappy code, she thinks maybe even Gabe's single-minded murder methods might be more effective. If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself. Too bad she doesn't have _time_.

Their bumbling can at least soften up the systems and give some distractions while she gets in. It'll have to do.

~~~

Sombra and Lúcio watch the WCG championships together, and Sombra thinks it's nice to have one friendship that isn't complicated. Sure, he can't know about a lot of her life, but she also doesn't have to undermine him or manipulate him or use him, so the secrecy is a small price to pay.

That's the problem with being a natural liar. Lúcio thinks she's a revolutionary, full of conviction. Talon thinks her personal stake in the uprising is an act to manipulate her marks. Widowmaker thinks she's obnoxious, and Reaper thinks she's a specialist who is barely competent in other areas, and they both think she's as loyal to Talon as they are. They're all at least a little right, and none of them have an accurate picture.

It's not like she has trouble with keeping the facades in order. Sombra doesn't think being a liar is inherently a bad thing, despite what other people might say about it. It just gets a little lonely sometimes.

~~~

Some Omnics are okay. Sombra isn't going to ignore a potential asset just because they're made of metal. Still, as a whole they unsettle her. Lúcio has no such problem, which she assumes is because he's young enough not to remember the Crisis.

She tells him she's pro-Omnic rights, and he believes her.

~~~

LumériCo leads forward to Volskaya and backwards to Vishkar, and Sombra gleefully chases down the thin connections until the threads stand out clearly on her mental map. She visualizes the world in a sequence of parts, bright strands connecting them and shining out of the dark. When pieces don't fit right, she moves them around and watches the threads untangle until everything's in the right place.

The shame about Guillermo Portero is that he seems like a pretty decent guy. He's nice. Unfortunately for him, he's a nice guy who's oblivious to the fact that he's not actually helping most people, and who's only nice to those he personally cares about. His employees. His family. His friends, for whom he does endless favors. He claims to care about the common people of Mexico, but in practice being a "job creator" doesn't help much. It just lets him pat himself on the back and say he's not a selfish scumbag.

Portero didn't even have the decency to properly incriminate himself in his emails. How inconsiderate. If you want something done right…

Sombra takes the actual evidence, and uses it to fabricate just a few extra pieces, which are all _accurate_ as far as all the information she's been able to find and so are not, necessarily, untrue. She fans the flames. By the time LumériCo's finished burning, Portero won't even be worth blackmailing, so she releases _everything_.

Then she goes to watch Lúcio's concert stream with a clean conscience.

Talon compensates her greatly.

~~~

Widow is watching her on the trip back from Russia. It's subtle, and might even be staring off into space if Sombra hadn't noticed how long it's continued. Gabe is a fuming mass of ash at the other end of the transport. He looks like he's literally boiling with frustration.

This is the fourth mission that Sombra has twisted to her own ends, more or less subtly. She may need to put her own efforts on hold for a little while before her companions can start getting suspicious. She rapidly starts calculating what she can put off and what she'll have to risk.

~~~

She finds Gabriel Reyes' wayward protege drinking by himself at a cantina south of the border. Sombra engages him in conversation three times, and all three times eventually fall off into silence again. She tells him her name is Juana García Pérez, and he says he's James Arness. He drinks twice as much as she does, doesn't hit on her once, and eventually slumps over asleep on the bar.

The conversation may be stilted, but he's not unfriendly. He humors her. McCree is very different from Gabe.

Except.

After McCree is down for the count and Sombra's contemplating the coke and tequila remaining in her glass, she pulls apart the mask. For all that he was open and charming, McCree told her nothing that a normal woman traveling through Ascensión couldn't have known by looking at him. If she _were_ Juana García Pérez, she would have been surprised to realize later that she didn't know anything about Señor Arness despite talking to him for the better part of an hour.

That caginess is a skill he shares with Gabe. Same with the way he seemed on guard no matter how drunk he got. Sombra isn't actually sure that he's asleep, and not just putting his head down to escape Juana's attention. If he is, he may need the alcohol to get past the hypervigilance enough to manage it.

Once or twice, there were even little turns of phrase he would use that reminded her of Gabe. McCree is a loose piece right now. She doesn't know if he's useful on his own, or if it would be helpful to mend his estrangement with Gabe, or better to bring him and Reaper to blows. Without knowing where Gabe is going to fall in her plans yet, she can't possibly place McCree.

~~~

Out of everyone Sombra knows, Lúcio is the most trustworthy. He is, in fact, _actually_ trustworthy.

She still has a backdoor into his personal computer.

Honestly, she just uses it to covertly make sure no one else is watching him, when she's feeling paranoid and has nothing else to do. That's why she finds encryption that isn't hers, and that's how she finds out he's in contact with Overwatch. It's not spyware, so that's something, but it still means it's only a matter of time before Lúcio innocently mentions her to his new allies, and then what? Will they convince him to set a trap for her? Use him unwittingly to trap her? Maybe he'll challenge her outright.

He'll think she's been lying to him. He won't be entirely wrong.

Sombra has no one to blame but herself for this. She should have known that Overwatch's current incarnation would be right up Lúcio's alley.

Lúcio had left Brazil with Sombra's blessings. By the very nature of who he is, he shakes up the structures the world runs on, and if Sombra's lucky the cracks might expose some of the workings for her. She doesn't actually have to be involved for him to do that.

Sombra waits as long as she can before she has to cut ties. She's not trustworthy, but she gives him the most honest goodbye that she can, and hopes they'll never see each other again.

~~~

They do, of course. Sombra would rather not have been the one to face Lúcio, but with Gabe returning to base at top speed her options were limited. Lúcio's on his way out the door when the guards tell them Tracer's out of sight and Gabe snarls, "Sombra. Did you get the other one?"

"No, sorry. I got here too late. I'm in pursuit now," she reports as the door clicks shut behind Lúcio.

 _Just one uncomplicated relationship_ , she thinks as she activates her camo. _Was that really so much to ask?_ The guards come and she slips through the door behind them. Lúcio is out of sight. They fan away from her, searching.

The chatter over her earpiece lets her know she's the only one with a chance of getting him. "On it," she confirms, tosses a beacon away from the building, and heads into the depths of the base. The break-in is too convenient a smoke-screen not to steal some data of her own.

She keeps part of her focus on the chatter of Reaper and the guards sweeping for other intruders while the lion's share goes to gently ripping through security settings as she crouches next to the data banks.

"Status, Sombra," Gabe's voice crackles over the comms. Sombra rolls her eyes. She's copying files.

"Sorry, _Reaper_ ," she says sweetly. "I lost him. He's too fast. I'm trying to pick up his trail but-"

Her only warning is one footstep, and she whips her head sideways to see Gabe's awful mask staring down the dark hall at her. This is the worst miscalculation she's ever made in her life, but before she can eject and activate the beacon he turns and walks away.

"Sombra? What's going on?" he asks with faux-urgency. She can still hear his voice clearly as he walks away.

Sombra runs with it. "Nothing. False alarm," she answers, disconnecting from the system. "I'm on my way back now." She activates the beacon and waits a few minutes before walking back to the building.

~~~

If Sombra can be said to have a flaw, it's that she can't stand to not know something. When Gabe doesn't say or do anything about her sabotage, waiting for it is bad, but not nearly as bad as not knowing _why_ he hasn't turned her in yet.

There was already a gap where she couldn't figure out how Gabe had gotten from _disgruntled Overwatch employee_ to _Reaper_ , but it doesn't account for his silence.

Lúcio tries to call her, but she has no intention of answering.

While she tries to dig up some leverage more damning than Gabriel's identity, Sombra decides to find out what he's going to blackmail her for.

"Better tell me what you want soon, Gabe, or I'm going to start to think you're just being nice."

"What makes you think I want anything?" he grumbles.

"Big, bad Reaper doing something out the kindness of his heart?" Sombra asks in return.

He laughs dryly. "Maybe I'm enjoying letting you hang."

He's not being serious. "Gabe, you're killing me," Sombra groans.

"That's what I do," he answers flatly. He tips his head, observing her from behind his faceplate. "It burns you that I have information on you. Don't like the taste of your own medicine?"

Rude. "Don't be so dramatic."

"It's a good teaching moment," Gabe says. "Actions have consequences."

"Seriously?" Sombra demands. "I'm not a child, Gabe. You can't talk to me that way."

"And I'm not a complete moron," Gabe answers. He's looming a little. "You've undermined almost half-a-dozen missions. _My_ missions."

"You want me to stop," Sombra assumes.

Gabe hums noncommittally. His edges fuzz for a moment. "Would it make you feel better if I gave you a secret in exchange?"

Sombra squints at him. "Why?"

"We don't have to be at cross-purposes."

Well okay. "Let's hear this secret, then."

Gabe backs off a few smokey steps. "You have no loyalty to Talon. You're only working for them because it benefits your long-term plans. You're gathering information. You're making your way up the ladder."

"Well I know all _that_ already," Sombra says, flat and annoyed. "What's your point?"

"Paciencia es una virtud," Gabe chides. "I'm telling you what I know so that you'll know I'm giving you something of equal value." Sombra arches a doubtful eyebrow but lets him continue. "You're playing the long game, and your goals are much bigger than Talon's petty desires, and so you have, with some regularity, sabotaged their efforts in favor of your own. That's _your_ secret."

Sombra nods reluctantly.

"My secret," Gabe says quietly, leaning forward so she can hear him, "is the same as yours."

~~~

Hindsight is 20/20. When she looks back over the information she has about Gabe, Sombra can see the pattern as clearly as her own. This is the man who won the Omnic Crisis, and his record with Talon is barely good enough to justify his paycheck.

Widow's is better, but there are hints. She's always cold, pun not intended, but there's a difference to the quality of the chill around her handlers. Harsher. More bitter. Sombra knows there's a cemetery in France that Widow visits every once in awhile.

Gabe and Widowmaker may be just as loyal to Talon as Sombra is. She'll have to figure out how to work that into her plans.

~~~

The thing about her plans is that they don't leave much room for compassion, or friendship, or any type of relationships at all. There's four missed calls from Lúcio, finished with a three word email: "Nós precisamos conversar." _We need to talk_.

She can make room, occasionally, for the people she likes to have slightly less consequences, but she can't make room to bring them with her. It will be lonely at the top. Sombra has made her peace with that. She's always been alone, just her against this stupid, unfair world.

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. If she wants a place. If she wants to be free. If she wants the world to be just a little more fair. It's not for nothing that she's devoted her adult life to flushing out the world's secret kings.

Lúcio is trying to do the same thing, for the same reason, but in a different way entirely. If he succeeds, the entire system Sombra's been working to control ceases to be. Her success means Lúcio will be stymied at every turn. They can't both win.

If Sombra is honest, and she so rarely is, Lúcio is the only person she might be willing to lose to. He's a good man, and he believes so strongly in people. Lúcio is an optimist. Sombra has never believed in basic human decency the way that he does. It's only a matter of time before that's crushed out of him.

Buf if he was right. If the systems could be changed or torn apart. If people could govern themselves and do right. It's a pipe dream, but if Lúcio was right about the world then maybe, maybe Sombra could be alright with all her work going to waste.

She's prepared to take over the world, but she could rip it down and rebuild it just as easily, if doing so would make a difference.

_Nós precisamos conversar._

Sombra stares at the email, and debates whether to tell the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, everyone! I hope to come back and explore these characters and this relationship more in the future, but for now I'm leaving you with the Lady or the Tiger ending. Sorry about that ;)
> 
> If you've enjoyed this, consider clicking the kudos button or leaving a comment. Or maybe check out my other fic, if you're into the writing style. Thanks again!


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